I Want to Be Wrong: Phoebe Bridgers and our generation's search for a "why"

Punisher pushes us to take a hard look at the absence of “why’s” in our life and ask ourselves, “What is my reason for living?” “For being a good person?” “For getting up in the morning?”

In her most recent album, Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers paints a portrait—sometimes delirious, always insightful—of a girl waking from an unsatisfying dream, walking along empty early morning streets, and wishing life were special, that she was.

These are the colors Bridgers uses to tell our story. The story of a spiritually homeless generation, hyper-connected through the internet, yet profoundly disconnected from our deepest selves.

She captures this, our unique brand of 21st century anxiety, with eerie accuracy and dry humor, articulating a desire for ultimate purpose while at the same time admitting the impossibility of belief.

“I want to believe,” she sings. “Instead, I look at the sky and I feel nothing.” Her words speak to something we can all relate to.

Raised in a secular world, skeptical of God and religion, we struggle to integrate our most human intuitions—love, awe, a sense of proximity to our dead—into a worldview we can understand.

Though we wish reality transcended our daily lives, we probably wouldn’t believe it if it did.

Bridgers’ music expresses a desperateness experienced by “a lot of kids our age,” said one 16-year-old listener. “A desperateness,” she said, “to have a good time and fall in love, and to find something to live for,” or, as Bridgers sings, to do what feels good “'til the feeling's gone forever.”

Punisher is about, and is for, people searching—hoping desperately—for answers. Yet, for all its haunting beauty and witty observation, answers are one thing the album can’t provide.

But I think we know that. I, and the many others who love it, don’t listen to Punisher to find spiritual guidance or a boost of optimism. We listen to have a friend to sit with us in the pitch black of our rooms. To have the consolation of companionship, despite knowing we’re lost.

Though it doesn’t pretend to have the solution, Punisher accurately identifies the source of our generation’s troubles: we are suffering from an absence of “why’s”.

In his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl quotes Friedrich Nietzsche as saying, “He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear with almost any ‘how’.”

A Holocaust survivor, Frankl observed that what was needed for life to be meaningful and understandable was a “why,” a reason, a purpose for being. It was this “why” for living—if based in an honest search for truth—that enabled people to endure suffering with gratitude and grace, and motivated them to change and reach their ideals.

According to Frankl, without a “why” we are more likely to resort to addiction or fall into depression. Without a “why” we are more likely to feel like the girl Bridgers describes: unsatisfied, alone, wishing life were special.

Punisher pushes us to take a hard look at the absence of “why’s” in our life and ask ourselves, “What is my reason for living?” “For being a good person?” “For getting up in the morning?”

The album contains Bridgers’ attempt to find such reasons. However, like so many of us who have gone “looking for a creation myth [but] ended up with a pair of cracked lips,” she fails to come up with a solid answer.

At one point she sings, “you know I'd stand on the corner, embarrassed with a picket sign, if it meant I would see you when I die.” Then she adds, in sad resolution, “But that’s impossible.”

I can’t help but feel that underneath the gorgeous chords and echoing vocals of Punisher, there is a fear. A fear of a universe that is cold, dead, and unintentional. A fear of a universe that has no “why.”

In what is for me the emotional climax of the album, Bridgers yells, “I want to be wrong.”

Well, what if she is?

What if the only way to live a truly meaningful life is to search for, and eventually find, a personal, yet transcendent, “why”? A “why” that runs deeper than the atheists’ arguments on YouTube and the influencers’ posts on Twitter. A “why,” a reason, a purpose for being, based in an honest search for truth.

Maybe once we’ve found this “why” we won’t look up at the stars anymore and wish we were wrong. Instead, maybe we will look up and feel we are waking to a richer and fuller reality, walking, accompanied by those we love, into the light of a new day, knowing, as much as anyone can, that life is special, that we are.

Log in to leave a comment below! Please continue this conversation by sharing your opinion in the comments section and sharing this blog post with your friends.